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Skyscrapers are frequently featured
in films for
their impressive appearance and potent symbolism. They convey an impression of power
– an old movie and TV cliché starts with the outside view of a
skyscraper with a voice-over conversation, continuing inside
the luxurious office of a tycoon or crime boss.

Skyscrapers' tight security and isolation from the rest of the
city makes them ideal for dramatic crisis and trap situations
including hostage-taking, heists and fire. Skyscrapers and other
large landmarks also feature prominently in disaster films,
where they are destroyed as a show of the power of nature or
invaders.

Real
skyscrapers

This is a list of actual skyscrapers that have a noticeable role
as themselves in films, sorted by chronological building
order. (See also: list of
skyscrapers.)

World
Trade Center (New York City 1973) - climbed by King Kong in the
1976 remake of King Kong. Exploded and
collapsed after being hit by a fragment of the Meteor (1979).
Leaped onto from a failing helicopter in Read or Die (May 2001). Used as a
makeshift runway by Snake
Plissken in Escape from New York (1981).
Severely damaged by meteor shower in Armageddon (1998) and severely damaged
by an ocean wave (from comet impact) in Deep Impact. The roof of the World
Trade Center was also the original scene of the final climax in the
movieMen in Black
II (2002), but after the September
11, 2001 attacks, the producers chose to reshoot the scene with
an "ordinary" roof in New York City. In Steven
Spielberg's movie Munich (2005), there is a scene
in the last minutes of the film where two men are walking with the
New York City skyline in the
background. Because the scene takes place before the World Trade
Center fell, a digital version of the World Trade Center was added
to the New York skyline. It was also used prominently in the 1973
film version of Godspell during the song "All For the
Best". In the 2006 film "World Trade Center", the World Trade
Center is seen, but is animated (or created with pictures from the
time before 9/11) In the film Home Alone 2 (1992) Kevin Mcallister
stops there while sight seeing.

Chrysler
Building (New York City 1930) - accidentally destroyed by U.S.
military forces in Godzilla (1998); destroyed by
a meteorite in Armageddon
(1998); flown through by the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four: Rise
of the Silver Surfer (2007).

MetLife
Building-destroyed first by Godzilla when he walked through the building
leaving a massive gap in it in the film "Godzilla" (1998). It was later destroyed in
"Knowing"(2009)when a solar
flare anhilates all of earth.

Taipei 101 (Taipei
2004) - while not yet featured in a major international film as of 2004, in local productions it
is fast becoming an Eiffel Tower-like cliché that the view
from every Taipei apartment includes Taipei 101.

Rialto Tower (Melbourne 1986) - featured in
Ghost
Rider (2007). The Ghost Rider is seen riding vertically up the
tower to elude the authorities. Many more of Melbournes towers and
buildings are featured throughout the movie.

Sydney Tower
(Sydney 2004) - destroyed by the monster Zilla in the Japanese film Godzilla: Final
Wars. Also destroyed by meteors in the Hallmark film
"Supernova", which was released in 2005.

Fictional
skyscrapers

This is a list of named fictional skyscrapers that have a
noticeable role in films (including notable science-fiction and
fantasy), sorted by chronological filming order. In some cases, an
actual building stands for the fictional one; in others, they are
created using elaborate miniature models.

New Tower of
Babel (Metropolis) - chief among the gothic
skyscrapers of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). The cityscape of
Metropolis was inspired from Lang's trip to Manhattan and was, in turn,
an inspiration for several dystopian science-fiction films
including Blade Runner and Dark
City.

Seacoast National Bank Building (New York City) - this
100-story, Empire State Building-inspired tower is the center of a
power struggle in Skyscraper Souls (1932), as
ruthless banker David Dwight attempts to gain full control of the
skyscraper.

Wynand Building (New York City) - the creation of the
uncompromising, objectivist
architect Howard Roark, it features in the film adaptation of Ayn
Rand's The
Fountainhead (1949). The world's tallest, it is the
culmination of Roark's ambition, "the will of man made
visible."

Glass Tower (San
Francisco) - this 138-story office/residential tower, the new
"tallest building in the world", is the setting of The
Towering Inferno (1974). In the film, the guests of the
top-floor opening ceremony are trapped by a fire that broke out due
to faulty wiring. The idea of the "world's tallest" was featured in
both novels on which the film was based, and was inspired,
ironically, by New York's World Trade Center which was
completed the year before the movie's release. Filmed prior to the
widespread use of Digital CGI, the Glass Tower was actually a
series of half inch and inch scale models. The miniatures cost one
million one hundred ten thousand dollars and the tallest of these
was 70 feet high and was guyed off in all four directions and
filmed against a blue screen on the concrete floor of Sersen Lake
at the Twentieth Century Fox Ranch in Malibu, California.
Similarly, five floors of the building were built in full scale at
the same facility for close up shooting of action scenes.

Tyrell Corporation Headquarters (Los Angeles) - the immense
truncated pyramid-shaped structure, flanked by inwardly-slanted
towers, dominates the cityscape of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
(1982). The futuristic city has been described as a place where the
height of the World Trade Center had become the norm, filled with
buildings hundreds of stories tall, with Tyrell's pyramid being six
or seven times the height of the WTC and at least a hundred times
more massive [1]. Main
protagonist Deckard himself lives on the 97th floor of a generic
building.

Nakatomi Plaza (Los Angeles) - taken over
by terrorists in the classic action film Die Hard (1988). The building is actually
Fox Plaza, 20th Century
Fox's Los Angeles headquarters. The Japanese
name of this and other fictional buildings (such as Nakamoto Tower
in 1993's Rising Sun) provides an
interesting window on the 1980s mindset that Japanese corporations
would take over the world's economy and real estate, especially
after the real-life acquisition of Rockefeller Center by a Mitsubishi subsidiary
(completed in 1989). In fact there have been relatively few such
takeovers, and few if any U.S. skyscrapers were ever actually named
after Japanese corporations.

Galactic Senate Building (Coruscant) - one of the
innumerable towers covering the fictional city-planet of Coruscant
from the Star Wars
universe, first seen on film in the Special
Edition of Return of the Jedi (1997), then in the Star
Wars prequels. On Coruscant, buildings are used as the foundations
for new buildings that actually pierce the cloud layer. The fifty
lower levels form a dangerous underworld where ordinary citizens
never go. The city-planet was inspired by Trantor in Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga.